To my eternal shame, I could not dig up a photo of Mr. Greif. Got on? (Image via Main Street)

When I was a teenager, I used to furtively look through the books in a small gay section at B. Dalton Bookseller in Genesee Valley Mall in Flint, Michigan. I'm pretty sure it didn't have a big sign; it may just have been a part of a social sciences shelf.

One day, I spied The Gay Book of Days (Main Street Press, 1982) by Martin Greif. I bought it without making eye contact with the clerk and hustled it home.

It was described on the cover as:

An evocatively illustrated who's who of who is, was, may have been, probably was, and almost certainly seems to have been gay during the past 5,000 years.

Clearly, this approach had an impact on me. I'm not breathlessly against outing like so many because to me, it's not a negative thing to wonder about someone, and it's at worst no worse than the sort of gossip in which we all engage almost every day of our lives. This book took homosexuality as a good thing to be, and it shocked me by alluding to rumors and facts regarding the presumed sexual orientations of countless historical figures, from Commodus to Tab Hunter.

“Greif's captions were the best. On Monty Clift: That's odd. Tallulah said he never blew her.”

The book also ended with a section entitled:

I Know They Are, You Know They Are, and They Know They Are, but Initials Will Just Have to Do

On that list were 65 sets of initials along with brief clues, soft-outing people who were gay but closeted and still very much alive. For example: “C.G., American actor,” which I was able to guess even then. “R. McD., English-born American actor” didn't leave much room for guessing!

But what about Greif himself?

Martin Joel Greif was born February 3, 1938, in the Bronx, graduating from Hunter College and Princeton. He was a professor in the '60s, and a biblical expert who turned to commercial publishing when he managed Time-Life Books for 10 years, and then co-founded Main Street Press with his partner, Lawrence Grow. It was Main Street that published The Gay Book of Days in 1982, featuring a foreword from Samuel Steward (1909-1993), aka the poet and writer Phil Andros.

I worked, from 1987 until 1992, for a literary agent in Chicago, and remember many submissions to Main Street Press; what a pity I had no idea the gay man who'd written one of my favorite books was just a query letter away.

Main Street specialized in Americana, but the sensation that put it on the map was Dogue, a 1986, dog-filled parody of Vogue Magazine. Yeah, novelty books and books about cute animals never fail.

Along with The Gay Book of Days, Greif published many more books, including photo books, a book on the 1939 World's Fair and other niche topics. Once he and Grow moved to Ireland, he published puzzle books and works in Irish.

In 1991, Grow died of an AIDS-related stroke. Greif followed him in death on November 17, 1996, also from AIDS, at age 58.

Greif changed my outlook on the world with his tea-spilling, cerebral, defiant closet-buster of a book, and his devotion to a diverse writing career. He was a role model to me with his hilarious captions and obsessive-compulsive listing — let's face it, I wrote a pop encyclopedia!

Ultimately, Martin Greif's book urged its readers to ask if people might be gay, and to ask ourselves why asking should be such a forbidden thing.